Columbus Day Has Drawn Protests Almost From Day 1

A reverend at Calvary Baptist Church in Manhattan appeared on the front page of The New York Times after he criticized Christopher Columbus, the Italian navigator who sailed to the Americas on behalf of Spain in 1492.

The reverend, R. S. MacArthur, said Columbus was “cruel, and guilty of many crimes.”

That complaint may sound familiar to those who condemn the explorer for opening a door to European colonialism, which brought disease, destruction and catastrophic wars to the people who already lived here.

But Mr. MacArthur said those words more than a century ago, in 1893. His comments suggested he was more affronted by Spain, which he called “the poorest and most ignorant country in Europe,” than concerned about Native Americans.

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An undated photograph of the Rev. R.S. MacArthur.CreditLibrary of Congress

He was one of many to have questioned the legacy of the explorer, whose arrival in the Americas has been celebrated in the United States for hundreds of years.

The makings of a holiday

Americans commemorated Columbus’s first landing in the Caribbean at least as early as 1792, when members of the Tammany Society of New York and, separately, the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, gathered to mark the 300th anniversary of the day the Spanish ships made landfall.

In 1892, President Benjamin Harrison said the entire country should observe “Discovery Day” to mark the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s landing. It was formally designated as a recurring national holiday on Oct. 1, 1934, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed that Oct. 12 would be a day to display the American flag and engage in “appropriate ceremonies in schools and churches” every year. (It was later changed to the second Monday of October.)

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Members of the Knights of Columbus during a Columbus Day event in 2003 in Washington.CreditMike Theiler/Getty Images

But Columbus’s role as an Italian representative would be complicated by World War II and the rise of Benito Mussolini.

‘Viva Mussolini’ in New York

In 1936, four years before Mussolini, the Italian dictator, formally declared war to fight alongside Adolf Hitler, rumors swirled that fascist sympathizers were helping to organize the Columbus Day celebrations in New York City.

In 1938, when thousands gathered at Central Park for the Columbus Day festivities, some shouted “Viva Mussolini” while listening to speeches. “The gathering was definitely sympathetic toward the Fascist regime in Italy,” The Times reported.

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Signs calling for the abolition of Columbus Day at a protest in Flagstaff, Ariz., last year.CreditJake Bacon/Associated Press

“All of us wanted to pay tribute to the discoverer and through him to other great Italians and to the many notable Italian achievements, but most of us drew the line at celebrating Benito Mussolini, or his friends, or his regime,” it reported.

Still, the celebration continued annually. And during the first Columbus Day parade after World War II, “the plight of Italy was dramatized” and marchers made appeals for aid to help the country recover.

‘We were here first’

In the decades since, Columbus came to be seen less as an explorer representing Italians and more as a European colonizer whose journeys led to the decimation of American indigenous populations.

Those ideas picked up steam during the early 1990s, when criticism about the explorer’s legacy became increasingly visible in cities including Boston, Denver, Philadelphia and Berkeley, Calif., amplifying many Native Americans’ longstanding complaints about the holiday.

“We were here first,” Ray Geer, a Paucatuck Eastern Pequot and president of the Connecticut River Powwow Society, said to The Times in 1991. “We find the notion that Columbus discovered us extremely distasteful.”

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A man waving a national flag during a protest in front of a Columbus monument in Mexico City in 1995.CreditReuters

Who needs ‘The Sopranos’?

Opposition to Columbus Day festivities has come in more prosaic forms, too.

In 1911, the real estate association representative Abraham Korn urged New York City officials not to spend $50,000 on the celebration. “We’ve done enough for Christopher Columbus by making a holiday,” he said. “No money should be spent in this way for fireworks.”

In 1949, the Fifth Avenue Association beseeched Mayor William O’Dwyer of New York to reroute the parade so as not to disrupt shoppers in Midtown Manhattan. “The association held that the disruption of traffic caused severe inconvenience to the general public, shoppers and property owners and thereby resulted in a serious loss of business.”

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Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York and the actors Lorraine Bracco and Dominic Chianese, from the hit HBO show “The Sopranos,” did not attend the Columbus Day parade in Manhattan in 2002. Instead, they ate lunch at Dominick’s in the Bronx.CreditKelly Guenther

And 15 years ago, there was a Columbus Day dust-up after Italian-American groups learned that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg wanted to march with actors from the hit television show “The Sopranos.”

They were not happy, and the Times columnist Clyde Haberman wrote on Oct. 22, 2002, that there was indignation and offense on all sides, including that of the mayor, who “deemed himself the injured party and skipped the parade, heading instead to the Bronx for linguine marinara.”